


Tangential

by Bitenomnom



Series: Mathematical Proof [48]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (sort of), A Study in Pink, Asexual!Sherlock, Cuddling, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, John has nightmares, Love, M/M, Sherlock considers being friends with benefits with his Work, Sherlock daydreams about being shot at, Sherlock divorces his Work, Sherlock is Married to His Work, Sherlock is a kept man, forehead kiss, foreshadowed beekeeping, hands in hair, tangents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 09:15:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitenomnom/pseuds/Bitenomnom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You know, for being married, you and your Work seem to have a pretty on-again, off-again relationship."</p><p>"Yes. I’d say it’s grounds for divorce, wouldn’t you?”</p><p>“If it’d mean less collateral damage to the flat, I’m all for it.” He pulled up the newspaper and had a glance over it. “But you do strike me as a bit of a kept man. Hope you’ve got a secret lover ready to snatch you up and take care of you.”</p><p>Sherlock could have said, “I might, if you’d like to keep me.” But instead, he asked, “Do you have any opinions on bees?”</p><p> </p><p>...In which John stitches up Sherlock's head (but not really), Sherlock comes into John's room at night to take his laptop (but not really), Sherlock is married to his Work (but not really), and John is more than proficient at keeping Sherlock (really, definitely).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tangential

**Author's Note:**

> I really wish I had an explanation for all the fluff lately, but I don't. Maybe it's just the stress of the end of the semester getting to me. XD Hope you don't mind, either way.
> 
> Today in one of my classes we had a presentation about an unpublished paper and how bad it was, and in my other class, we mostly just reviewed some old topics. But, the prof also briefly went over what one of the first lessons in the continuation of this class would be...so I've used that for this story.
> 
> I tagged it asexual!Sherlock because that's how I envisioned it as I wrote, but I think it can be viewed in a number of ways. It's not really an issue here no matter how you slice it, since the focus is on love, not sex.
> 
> Should also clarify that the four sections correspond to four different definitions of "tangential."

One way of estimating the value of a differential equation at various points, given, for instance, the relationship

du/dx = f(x,u)

and the starting point

u(x0) = u0,

is to use the fact that the slope at the starting point is equal to du/dx, and then partition the interval into bits of some particular length, h (which is ideally really small). Then, the value of u at various points along the interval can be found using the value of u at the previous point, along with the slope (forming a line which we can sort of project along our interval h—this is the tangent line of the function at the point u at the beginning of the interval). This method of using tangent lines to estimate the values of a differential equation is not that useful in practice, as other quicker methods exist.

 

***

 

I.  _pertaining to or of the nature of a tangent; being or moving in the direction of a tangent_ _  
_

            “And as you can see,” Sherlock plucked something up from the floor, “the bullet only just barely grazed his head; nonetheless, it _was_ fired at him.” He held the small hairs out to Lestrade. “It’s just his luck that the perpetrator was an awful shot.”

            “Awful shot, but still guilty,” Lestrade agreed.

            When they got back to the flat, Sherlock kept running his fingers over his scalp.

            “Dandruff?” John said.

            Sherlock sneered at him before resuming his activities. “Imagine the incredible unlikelihood,” he said, “of a bullet grazing you enough to remove hairs and a bit of skin from your head, and maybe burning your scalp, but doing nothing more.”

            “Rather not,” John said. Sherlock continued running his fingers through his hair as John fetched the takeaway from the front door and brought it back up. “Will you stop it?”

            “Why?”

            “Because I’m not all that keen on thinking of you being shot at,” John said. “And you look like you’re dreaming of the day it happens.”

            “Nonsense,” Sherlock said.

            Still, after popping in a DVD, John took a seat beside Sherlock and snatched his hands away from his head. “That’s enough of that.” He pushed Sherlock’s food into his lap, and Sherlock pried it open as John pressed play. He knew the drill: eat, and do it quickly, because as long as he hadn’t gotten what John deemed to be a proper meal’s worth in his stomach, John would keep putting in awful movies, or, worse, switch to some crap program about vehicles and doing inadvisable things with them. Sometimes, Sherlock ate extra slowly, just to keep John awake longer than he wanted to be. Sometimes he got so distracted insulting the film that it took him two films to eat his dinner. John always sat closer during the second film. Once, he’d let Sherlock put his feet in his lap.

            Once Sherlock had reached into the box for the fateful first bite, he felt something against his scalp. John was tracing lines along it.

            “What are you doing?” Sherlock shivered at the feeling. “Shooting at me?”

            “Stitching you back up,” John said.

           Sherlock ate slowly.

 

 

II. _divergent or digressive, as from a subject under consideration_

 

            “That’s not even the point,” John grumbled. He had made the mistake of pointing out that Sherlock walking into his room in the middle of the night to retrieve his laptop for some reason or another had woken him up.

            “I think if you place it nearer the door, that should help,” Sherlock said.

            “The point is that you _come into my room_ ,” John spoke each word slowly and deliberately, knowing it would bother Sherlock, “and _take my things,_ ” he glanced toward the laptop that Sherlock had tucked under his arm and snuck out with hours before, “ _while I’m asleep._ ”

            “You don’t even need to bring it back up to your room,” Sherlock pointed out.

            “This is about privacy, Sherlock,” John snapped. “Not your convenience.”

            “I won’t wake you up next time.”

            John fumed quietly, running a hand through his hair and taking a few paces one way, and then another. “Do you even understand what I’m saying when I tell you that that’s not the point?” He stopped, looked Sherlock in the eye. “We are discussing _you_ respecting _my_ space.”

            “You were thrashing about,” Sherlock said quietly. “Making alarming sounds.”

            John paused.

            “I came up to check on you, and you were clearly having a nightmare.”

            “You came up to check on me?” John hesitated. “Why didn’t you say so?”

            Sherlock was silent.

            “You could’ve said that, rather than shaking me awake for, ‘Where’s your laptop, John?’” Of course, that was when he should have known something was wrong: Sherlock, not immediately observing upon entering the room that John had placed his laptop next to the bed? Preposterous. “So why not?”

            Sherlock wasn’t thinking about what was or wasn’t preposterous; he was thinking about the bed dipping under his weight, if he had sat down next to John and shook him awake, if he had succumbed to the way his hand was drawn toward John’s face, and laid it there, not under the pretense of checking his temperature, but just because it felt nice. He thought about telling John, “You were having a nightmare and I was worried, so now I’m waking you.” He thought about the number of variants of it that had crossed his mind. He thought about how John would react.

            “I was afraid,” Sherlock said.

            “Of what?”

            He didn’t answer.

           

           

III. _tending to digress or to reply to questions obliquely_

 

            On their first case, John had made some almost tentatively flirting comment, something about he and Sherlock both being unattached.

            Sherlock had said, “I consider myself married to my Work.”

            Which was not, exactly, a denial of John’s statement; and anyway, John, after some time, would have to have been observant enough at least to see that Work spent a great deal of time being generally absent, without much of an explanation at all. Sherlock considered suggesting a ‘friends with benefits’ type relationship to it, if it wasn’t going to stick around anyway, so that Sherlock could at least move on to other things in addition to it.

            John had never brought the conversation up again, despite Work’s frequent and pronounced disappearances. Sherlock concluded that either John was too distressed by the idea of being the catalyst breaking up a marriage already in peril, or else was completely uninterested.

            “I’m married to my Work,” was not at all, then, really, a fitting response to John’s almost-question. But John didn’t seem to notice, and he never pressed the issue, so neither did Sherlock.

            “ _Bored_ ,” was what Sherlock had just been saying. He was not, much as he might like to be, shooting at the wall; he was not running any terribly exciting experiments, all of them currently incubating or waiting for liquids to settle out.

            The reason he was thinking about being married to his Work was not because he was feeling particularly reflective or thoughtful.

            He’d said, “ _Ugh,_ John, could you go murder someone in an interesting way?”

            John had found it funny up until it had seemed maybe a little too much like Sherlock was serious.

            “I’m _kidding,_ ” Sherlock specified, “unless of course you do have a method and a target in mind.”

            John rolled his eyes. “You know, for being married, you and your Work seem to have a pretty on-again, off-again relationship,” he’d joked.

            And so Sherlock had thought about that evening at Angelo’s, and wondered if John would have continued making advances, if he’d just shut up, or maybe answered more directly. He could’ve said, “Yes, that’s true, we’re both unattached.” But maybe John would want something that he didn’t want, and it would all be that much more complicated. Maybe this was better. Maybe it wasn’t.

            “Yes,” Sherlock said in response to John. “I’d say it’s grounds for divorce, wouldn’t you?”

            John laughed. “If it’d mean less collateral damage to the flat, I’m all for it.” He pulled up the newspaper and had a glance over it. “But you do strike me as a bit of a kept man. Hope you’ve got a secret lover ready to snatch you up and take care of you.”

            Sherlock could have said, “I might, if you’d like to keep me.” But instead, he asked, “Do you have any opinions on bees?”

           

           

IV. _merely touching; slightly connected_

 

            “Stitch me up again,” Sherlock said, as John curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea.

            “What?”

            “My head.” Sherlock pointed to it. He placed himself conveniently adjacent to John’s folded legs, then got a better idea, and placed his head directly in the path of John’s left hand, were he to lower it from his mug. It happened that that placed his head in John’s lap.

            “Oh,” John said, “right. You get shot at again?”

            “Mm,” Sherlock said. “Yes.” He tilted his head to rest a cheek against John’s leg. “I’m bleeding quite profusely; it seems the bullet dug slightly into my scalp along its trajectory.”

            John _tsk_ ed. “Can’t have that. Let me see.” He leaned forward to set his tea on the table, and ran his fingers through Sherlock’s hair.

            “Thank you,” Sherlock said.

            “Get shot anyplace else?” John asked softly.

            “Where do I get shot in your nightmares?” Sherlock asked back.

John paused, eyes boring into Sherlock, trying to gauge the motive behind the question. Eventually, he said, “I’ll tell you if you tell me why you were frightened about waking me.”

            “I thought it would distress you,” Sherlock said. “I thought you would react badly.”

            “I’m sure that’s not it.” John smiled. “You don’t give a rat’s arse if you distress me. You do that on a daily basis.”

            Sherlock grabbed John’s hand and laid it over his chest. “Maybe,” he said, “but I tend to assume I’m unwelcome in your bed.”

            John traced lines over the surface of Sherlock’s shirt, pressing it down against his chest, stitching him up. “In my nightmares,” he finally muttered, “I don’t think there’s a place you _haven’t_ gotten shot.” His voice seemed to catch in his throat. “When I wake up, it hurts where it happened.”

            Sherlock wondered if this was at all related to John’s leg: perhaps he’d seen someone else get shot there. The effects of the nightmares were more temporary than those on his leg had been, or perhaps occurred specifically because the precedent had been set by John’s psychosomatic leg pain.

            John took in a slow breath, seemed to be deciding something. “If I have one tonight,” he said, “I’m going to need stitches straight away when I wake up. I’ll need someone on-site.” His fingers paused their tracing. “Preferably someone who can manage not to dangle his damnably long legs over me while I sleep.”

            “I can keep to my side,” Sherlock said.

            “You think you get a whole side, then?” John smiled.

            Instead of answering, Sherlock said, “Let’s order Indian,” and, “I’ve queued up a documentary about apiculture.”

            “Wait ‘til Work hears you’re leaving her for bees,” John said, fishing his mobile out of his pocket.

            “Don’t be stupid, John,” Sherlock leaned into the soft expansion and contraction of John’s belly as he breathed. “The bees won’t be for years.”

            “Mm,” John said while he dialed the number for the restaurant and then held the phone up to his ear.

            “Anyway,” Sherlock said, “You said I seem like a kept man, but with the bees, I’d be doing the keeping. Hardly a suitable marriage arrangement.”

            The corners of John’s eyes wrinkled as he smiled at Sherlock’s musings, waiting for someone on the other end to pick up. “Hello,” he finally said into the phone.

            “You, on the other hand,” Sherlock continued, “have already proven to be more than proficient.”

            A tinny tone on the other end of the line asked into silence, “ _Hello? Are you calling to place an order for takeaway?_ ”

            John gaped, then laughed, leaning down to kiss Sherlock’s forehead. “Yeah,” he said into the phone. “Sorry, yeah, I am. Definitely.”

            “Definitely,” Sherlock agreed, and he cuddled deeper into John, and John kept him there until their dinner arrived, and for a long time past that, too.

**Author's Note:**

> [Shuhart](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Shuhart/pseuds/Shuhart) was kind enough to translate this story to [Russian](http://ficbook.net/readfic/570494).


End file.
